'Botmaster' admits infecting 250,000 computers

An Internet security consultant installed malicious code on clients' and others' machines, and may now face up to 60 years in prison.

The story "'Botmaster' admits infecting 250,000 computers" published November 10, 2007 at 11:09 AM is no longer available on CNET News.

Content from Reuters expires after 30 days.

[hadaso]

Operating a botnet should be enough

Why is it that they need to prove that the man was using the quarter million zombies for fraud to put the man in jail? Or to show he defrauded a dutch company of $19,000? Let's say a professional is paid $4 to clean one infected PC. Then cleaning 250,000 costs a million bucks. Can you find someone to do it for $4 per PC? If you do it yourself, do you value your time at $4? The damage caused is probably much higher than a million $$, but still the law enforcement people seem to need some kind of "real crime" because just infecting PCs casing millions of $$ of damages to hundreds of thoousands of people is sort of OK.<br /><br />Now take the most common use of botnets - that which earns lots of money to their operators: sending spam. How much damage does spam cause? You can "just hit delete"! How much does it cost to "just hit delete"? Approximately the time it takes an average person to see enough to positively decide this is junk, and then another half second to junk it. So let's say it's 3.6 seconds, just so we have a nice round numbers. So a 1000 spam messages take one working hour to clean up, and a spam run of 100,000,000 messages costs 100,000 working hours. Let's say you get someone to do it at minimum wage, which is $5.85 in the US right now (according to Wikipedia. It's higher in Europe, and most spam recipents' time is worth more than that). Then you get that the cost of just cleaning the junk of one spam run to less than all the mailboxes in just the USA is more than half a million dollars! Shouldn't this alone be enough to put the spammers in jail?<br /><br />Spammers are thieves. They steal the media on which they post their advertisements, and the value of what they steal from all of us is millions of $$ each day. Law enforcement should find a way to get them and convict them for the damage they cause.

[mbrusl]

Botmasters, virus writers and spammers should pay dearly

I agree, these criminals should pay dearly by being sentenced to a very long time in jail. Their co-conspirators should also pay. I think its time that these criminals be rounded up. I myself run a web service called <a href="http://www.spacequad.com">Spacequad Anti-Spam Services</a>, that finds and turn in spammers for criminal activities. So I know how difficult it can be. Now with this Whois debate going on, if they scrap it, we all will suffer even more. Because there will be no real way of finding out who the domain belongs to. Not that it helps find the real name of the spammers, but at least we still can contact the Registrar in most cases. Not that some of the Registrars in Asia really care if they can be contacted or not, not to mention also that they either do not provide full information or in English at all.

[aSiriusTHoTH]

just about everyone spams..

Its funny you talk about people who spam as theives. Don't you know many very large companies, to small companies use spamming techniques? There are billion companies that employ smaller companies, and those smaller companies employ even smaller companies to spam?<br /><br />How to stop spam? Stop the companies paying people to spam. Like how to stop drugs? Stop the people making the money on the top.

[Mergatroid Mania]

Throw away the key

Another person responsible for making people living in this world miserable.<br /><br />The world could do without him and his ilk.

[The_Decider]

The government pulls crap like this daily

When are the real crooks going to be put away?

[NoVista]

I predict

this miscreant will be working for the U.S. government within 6 months ...<br /><br />What he claims is probably a small fraction of what he actually did. If he'd on the other hand, trashed billions of dollars in Irak, he'd probably have the Medal of Freedom.<br /><br />In any case, he's their kind of guy!

[ramudd]

This could end all spam

Catch them and then a few public hangings like they do in Iraq might let them understand that we are getting really PO'd about this SPAM crap. At least it will stop each one hanged from becoming a repeat offender.